Column: Ed FitzGerald drove his chances into ground

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald speaks Friday in Columbus after the revelation of a 2012 police report showing him alone in a vehicle with a woman not his wife.(Photo: AP Photo/Ann Sanner)

Ed FitzGerald's campaign for Ohio governor has taken a sharp turn from boring and uninspired into a late-night talk show joke.

How bad is it? Republican Gov. John Kasich's campaign isn't even talking about the Democrat's problems. They speak for themselves.

FitzGerald's string of laughably bad news started with new numbers a week ago. A Quinnipiac Poll found that fewer Ohio voters knew enough about him to have an opinion in July than in May. Oops.

Then a police report surfaced that showed FitzGerald was found alone in a car with a woman who wasn't his wife at 4:30 one morning in October 2012. He and the woman – part of a visiting Irish delegation – were in a parking lot in a Cleveland suburb when someone noticed and called police, saying they had been there for a half hour.

This is actually a fairly typical campaign revelation, and not necessarily fatal. The stop may even have been an innocent one by lost motorists trying to find their way, as FitzGerald, a former FBI agent, insisted.

The side-splitting dagger? A driver's learning permit.

As the state's media dug into the 2012 traffic stop, they learned that FitzGerald was driving with a temporary permit that night. In fact, it turns out, from 2002 until shortly after that parking lot encounter, he either had no driver's license at all or a temporary permit, which allows the holder to drive only with a licensed driver in the car. So, reporters zeroed in on the fact that FitzGerald must have broken the law if he was telling the truth about driving home after dropping his passenger at her hotel.

But the far bigger issue is the bizarreness of not having a proper driver's license for a decade. FitzGerald spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said Wednesday it was an unfortunate but simple matter of procrastination, not renewing his expired license in 2002 for so long that it would have required retaking the test.

FitzGerald had a series of learner's permits from 2008 to 2012, including when he was mayor and safety-service director of Lakewood, Ohio, and at the start of his term as county executive.

"There isn't an acceptable excuse, and he realizes that," Hitt said. "He just kept putting off something that shouldn't have been put off."

If Jimmy Kimmel and his ilk haven't weighed in, they should. A follower on Twitter joked that FitzGerald "has probably earned the support of every Ohioan with a learner's permit. Too bad he's the only one of 'em old enough to vote."

It's only August, but it's hard to imagine FitzGerald posing any kind of credible challenge to Kasich. He wasn't doing well before the revelations; last week's Quinnipiac Poll showed him behind 36 percent to 48 percent, with a 3 percent margin of error.